Classifying Tactile Paving Crimes Using D&D Alignment - EMF 2026

How did What's happened here? Um, okay. Yeah, I've got a terrible confession which is um I'm going to probably do DND crimes. Um, I really like the alignment framework from DN D. This talk is using it to talk about tactile paving crimes. I've never played Dn D. I will claim tactile paving domain knowledge, but not DND domain knowledge. So, um, if you're here for if you're mainly here for the D and D content, then I'm sorry for disappointing you. Um, if you're here for tactile paving, which I'm amazed, uh, then yeah, hopefully you won't be disappointed. Um, okay. So, uh, yeah, the first thing is how I became obsessed with tactile paving. Um, so, um, I've been following disabled people around since with with their permission. um doing various re research projects uh to do with the design of streets and accessibility. And um I got into it because my first job out of university was designing street furniture. I never really thought about that someone designed street furniture or the rest of the street really like most people. But then um someone emailed our department and I got this job and I ended up designing street furniture and I loved designing street furniture and um this is Adah who's there sitting on something I designed like 20 years ago I think 21 years ago um in Cuden um and I realized that uh yeah the the design of our streets matters a lot um and everyone has to use them and when they're good it makes a place feel really great and when they're bad it makes a place feel bad. And as I started to learn about the way disabled people are impacted by street design, then obviously it has a huge impact on people's lives and people's independence if the street design is good. Um, and then I've designed other things in my life, some of which are are as good as street furniture, but a lot of things I've worked on, I'm like, "No, it's not as good as the street." And so I've always like ended up coming back uh to work on uh street design projects. Um about uh just under 20 years ago there was a big argument in the street design disability community or the between the street design and disability communities about um exhibition road. And um it was that argument that led to me getting hired to do a research project about um how people with sight loss are affected by street design. And that's how I started following disabled people around. Um, and then since then I keep getting asked to do projects by local authorities or by TfL or different people um to do research on on uh how streets affect disabled people. Um, this is the kind of thing I was a lot younger then. Um but uh it's uh it's a good methodology I think for figuring out how people are affected by something. Um it's a lot better than having a focus group about it I guess. Um doing this work uh and gradually expanding out to like uh looking at the full spectrum of needs from the environment. um you start to understand the uh conflicts between the different groups of disabled people that often need different things from streets. Uh and and so you can do something to help one group and it might make things worse for another group. Um and also uh even within you know people with sight loss, there's also like a spectrum of different needs. Um, and I've, yeah, I'm just showing these cuz these are different, this is a project I did with the City of London Corporation where uh, we talked to like 46 uh, people with disabled people about every aspect of the street and got them to score it and and figure out what was helpful and what was unhelpful for different different groups. Um, so whenever I've done this work, tactile paving keeps coming up. it comes up as something that's very impactful for um certain groups of um blind and partially cighted people, but it's also something that has uh quite a negative impact on quite a lot of other disabled people. And so there's an argument for trying to what we're putting down trying to make it work as as well as it can. Um so what is it? So I guess the short the thing I'd say to my children is it's the bobbly pavement you get around crossings. Um, originally it came from Japan and in Japan they had quite a complicated system originally with lots of different types and then they did a rationalization relatively early on and rationalized down to two types and this is more or less what they do across East Asia, Australasia. Um the ones with the long bars say uh follow me and the ones with the dots say stop and reorientate. And that's quite a simple system and you see this kind of paving deployed with quite a lot of consistency uh across East Asia. Um there is a crime in this photo that I'll I'll uh come to later. Um, in this country we don't do it like that at all. We've got in the tactile paving guidance six different types. Um, actually five of them are in the the ones with the pictures that look the same, they're in the tactile paving guidance for streets. And then the one that looks different, which has got bubbles that are not that are in like a checkerboard pattern, I guess that's the one for platform edges in uh stations. But the um you've got the blister, which is the most common one. That's the one we use both to mark the edge of a crossing point, but also to mark to lead you from the building line to the crossing point, and we call that the stem or the tail. Um then there's a one with long bobbles that's only used on tram platforms. Um, and then there are three different ones that have got long lines of different uh dimensions which in practice are quite difficult to tell apart uh for a lot of people. Um, but we have uh corduroy one that's a hazard warning that we're supposed to use at the top of steps or when you're entering an area that's shared with bikes or there's some other hazard like the end of a tram platform um or the start of a tram platform. And then we've got this uh what they call ladder and tram line which is bars that are flat topped and slightly further apart. And um they're supposed to go with this central delineator strip thing in order to differentiate where you've got a path that's got a cycle route on one side and and a walking route on the other side and they're at the same height. Uh you're supposed to lay this ladder and tram line um in the direction of travel on the bike route side and in across the direction of travel on the walking side. And then you're supposed to lay this strip that that's kind of um beveled on both sides and 50 mil high um on the in between them. Um and then uh we've got the sorry u yeah then it's 20 mil high. Then we've got um the guidance path, which is the one that they use in Asia to mean follow me. And so these are long long um strips uh but they're they're they're kind of rounded at the ends. They're not continuous. Um again, very difficult in practice to tell these apart if you're standing on them or even if you're feeling them with a long cane. Probably easier with a long cane. Um, so here's a video of some um, blind and partially sighted people using tactical waving and talking about it. No, it isn't. >> So I use the tactile markers also to tell me where it is, tell me my location. Okay, I'm on a tactile bit now. And I've got Halifax on my left. Now these are some of my markers. side. That's why I know I'm at Halifax and then to the curb. Good girl. Look. And then now we're going to be at Nat West. Should be at N West now. >> So that was Cheney. She's a guide dog user. This is Tony. He's a long user. >> Uh yeah, I can see that line on the right. Good. Hello. Okay. Uh >> there a lot of crimes. Yeah, I >> think. Brilliant. Brilliant. And no, it's still dark. I >> So Tony doesn't know. >> He's just walked over the stem for that crossing, but he doesn't know if it's the stem for that crossing or the tactile marking the edge of the crossing that's 90° around the corner. But he because he's got some light perception, he's looking for the light between the buildings in order to figure out where he is. what I'd call my normal route into Brmley. Uh I can hear the traffic going down Kentish Way here. I'm going to head off at an oblique angle until I hit uh the crossing which I had hoped to find earlier. >> This is Dick. He's a retired copper, so he's incredibly thorough, like a really great person to follow around. Like he's giving a witness statement every time. >> [snorts] >> So, and here for Dick, you know, the the guardrail is a much more reliable indicator. >> Therefore, because I know that there's an obstruction uh against the side of the protective fencing here. If I didn't know that was there, I would walk straight into it. And it actually is the crossing that I'm looking for. Again, that is now clear to cross. So earlier he tried to find the crossing kind of walked over the tactile paving without picking up and then missed white is really very useful. So clear delineation between where the pedestrian has rights and where the motorists have rights. >> And so this gentleman so I guess we've got what I'm going to talk about now three three different street users. I guess it's like when I think about it's like when I think about how did how do blind devices people use the street I always think about three different types of blind devices I use obviously there are like 2 million and they're all different but um I find that these three segments are quite helpful um so people that are using long canes like uh Dick and Tony where they're picking up quite a lot of information tactile information from the environment through the cane tip Um, but they've got very little situational awareness beyond the cane tip. Um, people like Sheney that are using guide dogs where the guide dog is taking them around quite a lot of obstacles. Um, it's doing some things for them, but they still need to be aware of where they are. Particularly, they need to be aware of if the guide dog has made a mistake. And so for them the tactile paving is very important to uh confirm that you know if they've told the guide dog to stop at the edge of the road that they have stopped at the edge of the road and that so that they need to know that where the edge of the road is basically which obviously if there wasn't this tassel they wouldn't but they're picking up through their feet and so they're potentially less able to detect it or they're it's harder for them to detect small areas. So, like that thing I showed you from Japan, that probably works quite well for longe users. Um, but it probably wouldn't work very well for guide dog users, but there are much there are a lot more guide dog users here than there are in Japan. And so, it it sort of makes sense that they're doing it like that. Um, and then um you've got what I call residual sight users. So people who are registered blind or partially sighted, but where they have enough vision that that's more useful to them than any mobility aid that they might be using. And so the last gentleman in that video, he's talking about their contrast in the environment. And for him, that's much more important than any of the tactile cues. So um what is the law when it comes to tactile paving? So it's defined by this document called guidance on the use of tactile paving surfaces. um which uh it was originally published in 1998 um and then it was updated in 2021 although not changed very much um certainly not not changed in woo very significant ways. um it's guidance. It's not legally binding, but there's been some uh like judicial reviews brought against local authorities that have completely ignored it. And the judge didn't convert the guidance into compulsory, but they did say if you're going to ignore it, you have to prove that you followed a process and and that there's some evidence for why you're ignoring it or why you're doing something different. And so you you don't have to follow it, but you have to have a good reason why you're not following it. Um there's also this document called uh design manual for roads and bridges which um up until about 20 years ago was uh the only manual for building roads and streets which was why we ended up with all of these high streets that felt like dual carriageways or they had guardrail everywhere and you had to go miles to cross the road and and it they weren't very friendly for pedestrians. And so there's been a movement over the last 20 years um where this document called manual for streets came out and before that and then definitely a lot since then there's been a movement to try and make streets uh work better for pedestrians and a lot of that has involved getting rid of things like guardrail and um moving crossing points. So, uh, moving crossing points where they were indented a long way down the side of roads, moving them back onto the desire lines of where people, pedestrians actually want to go. But that means that um, well, I'll explain. That means that certain things, assumptions that were made when they were writing the original tactile paving guidance don't hold anymore for the um, for the installations we're actually doing. So, here are two pictures from Street View of Exhibition Road. Um they did this shared space. This was like very very extreme version of what they said to do in manual for streets. Um but before that it was all guardrail. It was all control crossings. Um I don't think either of these are very good actually. I think there's probably something in between they could have done that would have been the right thing. But um but yeah that's where we are. So um in the guidance there are two there's a lot that I think could be a lot better but I think there are these two diagrams here that I think are the most the most common cause of crimes. Um so uh particularly this one on the right. So it shows a raised uh traffic table um and uh it's got um so at a a crossroads of two minor roads and it's got um it's got eight bits of tactile paving on it marking the crossing points across each of those roads. But then in between there isn't any tactile paving. And it it has a little leader that comes out and it says for the radius in between the bits of tactile paving. like here and here and up there. It says uh curb upstand or barrier required. No one does that. Um they they just build it like this as you'll see. Um and uh the guidance doesn't tell you what to do apart from it doesn't even show you what to do in the picture. It just writes it there. Um and then the other thing is there's an assumption built into the guidance that um people will use the back edge of the tactile paving area in order to figure out which direction to cross the road in. So this picture, it's got a a crossing point where the direction of crossing isn't perpendicular to the curve edge. Um, and so in that situation, the guidance calls for basically this big triangle of tactile paving along the curb edge so that the back edge is uh perpendicular to the direction of travel and um well, you'll see there are some crimes uh that that are caused by this. Um so uh yeah, this is when I fought the law. So I've got history. Um about 12 years ago I tried to get some made some small adjustments to the guidance to try and particularly to solve the problem of these under underlineated level surfaces cropping up like in this picture of with the uh area between the tactile areas. Um and uh I went about it in a very like so obviously it was as a result of having done a load of shadowing projects with different disabled people and saying seeing that paving wasn't working very well for the people with sight loss and it was causing issues for lots of the other um other people I was following around. Um and I like convened a workshop with people from guide dogs with people from the department for transport people from TfL um actual um blind and partly site people that I followed around. I made tactile models of different options for layouts of tactile paving. I thought I'd done it in a very like design methods IDEDO kind of agile way. Um, and and originally it was going to be like just a pamphlet of like, hey, we could do this, but then the head of accessibility at the Department of Transport got involved and and and again this was like peak agile government Rowan silver GDS moment and so they were like, "Yeah, let's just put it out to consultation and see what happens." Um, so uh we we went as far as a consultation. Um, and then it just got completely went down in flames. It was a total catastrophe. Um, and I realized that um, probably what we were proposing was sensible, but we hadn't explained why we wanted to do it and why why it was needed very well. Um, and that's why it hadn't worked. And so I walked away and I was like, I'm never never going near this again. I did all this work for free. U, you know, we, you know, this is the best shot we're ever going to have. Um, but I'm back. Um, oh, I'm going the wrong way. So, why now? Um, so I've continued to talk to disabled people about street design. We turned the city of London street accessibility tool into a bigger thing last year into like um with transport for all and we uh interviewed another like 60 disabled people around the country. But what we also did was and it's now this massive spreadsheet where you [clears throat] can model different things that you're designing in the street uh different street features and it will show you the likely impact on like 13 different segments of uh disabled street users. Um but as part of it we went out and did like a survey of different street designs around the country. I did it with some urban designers and uh in order to show them as videos to the people we were interviewing, but also I made tactile models of a lot of them for the people with sight loss I I was interviewing. Um and we saw some really mad stuff. This is the maddest thing. and and we were just stood there and it for about we stood there for about 20 minutes trying to figure out like what was the thought process like we realized that they were they were actually trying I think but this on leaf walk in Edinburgh um you should go and see it it's worth it >> [laughter] >> um uh And um yeah, we we didn't really have a vocabulary for like we've seen all of these things that were like bad tactile phasing and we and then I realized like what these are is crimes. And so then I thought well okay I realized that there are these are definitely crimes but then I thought actually there are different types of crimes and that's where the D&D framework came in. I remembered it. I was like we can classify the crimes and actually I think it helps us to understand what's working and what isn't working about the guidance. So this is my only slide about D and D. This is the D&D framework. OB actually it's more complicated than this because there's a neutral stage but basically there are two axes good and evil and lawful and chaotic and characters exist somewhere on this spectrum and it predicts what they're going to do. Is that right D&D fans? >> Okay, [laughter] thanks. Um so and they can be neutral right in all of these but I simplified. Um so in terms of tactile paving crimes well obviously lawful good that's not a crime. So lawful good is following the guidance and it works for the people that are actually using it. So um this is like your classic crossing installation. There's a tactile stem coming back to the building line. So a long can user that's following the building line can pick up the stem and find the crossing point. Um you've got a nice drop curb with the edge of the road marked properly. Um there's still I think a bit of a crime here. I would actually call this lawful neutral because if we switch it to black and white, a lot of people don't have color perception. The tactile paving becomes basically invisible. So the guidance says it has to be red. the guidance doesn't mandate a level of tonal contrast with the surrounding caving. So you can end up with something that is the right color, but it's not necessarily doing the job it's supposed to do. Um, this is what you're supposed to do at a uncontrolled crossing point. So a controlled crossing is a signal one or a zebra. They're both controlled. We call the signal one a signal controlled and a zebra just a zebra, but they're both controlled, I guess. Um, and they have the same tactile paving layout, which is the uh, yeah, the stem. And you should at the end of the stem, you should find one of the crossing posts, which actually is just about there in the edge of the picture, but I did not crop this picture. Well, um, the the uncontrolled one, no stem, and it should be this yellowy buff color. There's also what I was saying before, the ladder and tram line. So, this is how it's supposed to be on a cycle track. Um, and yeah, that's basically, yeah, those are the lawful good ones. That's roughly what you're supposed to do. Um, so chaotic evil. Again, these should be uncontroversial. These are the ones where they haven't followed the guidance and it doesn't work. They've just freelanced. So, this one is really heartbreaking for me. Absolutely heartbreaking. So this is in this is round the corner from bank junction in the city of London. So I built them this street accessibility tool city of London and it said don't do this and and I knew it worked because I tried loads of times. I've told local authorities not to do this and and they've gone back and they've done it and uh they did the whole of Bank Junction and they used the tool. The head of the streets made them use it on everything and they didn't do it. I'll show you later. They did the crime but it was a chaotic good crime I think. Um but uh then like a new member came in bit later they did went around the corner they just did it. Um so the problem here is there's a crossing point that's delineated there with tactile ping but then you've got this whole area here where it's level. So there's no way of telling when you're moving from the footway into the carriageway and there's nothing there to tell you. Um that is evil. So um this is a similar one but a bit more bonkers. They were like delineate a strip thing now. We'll just paint a line. And also this is like a floating bus stop but even if you don't want to use the bus, you still have to cross to the bus stop and then cross the cycle track back. It's bad. Um, I don't even know really. Yeah, I can't even explain what they were doing, but it's definitely not what they were supposed to do in the guidance. Um, and yeah, this one again, other angles it's even matter. Go and look at it. Wild. Um so more interestingly the other two the lawful evil and the chaotic good cuz for me these are the points where indicating where we need to change something about the guidance. So uh yeah this is the one I was telling you about where they basically built that diagram that I showed you without the barrier in the middle. So you've got these areas in between the bits of tactile paving where you can just wander off into the road disaster. And the the one on the right it's in Camden in London. They've tried really hard. Like they've painted the white curbs. They've painted the bullets. These are obviously people that care about disabled people and they're trying to make an accessible street, but it's not like they they don't care. They just have done the wrong thing because they built the diagram in the guidance like it but they didn't read the thing. I don't know what happened, but um um again, same kind of problem here. So again, it feels like here they've tried really hard. They built the stem almost all the way to the building line. Uh but again you've got this level area under delineated. Um here the guidance says if the if there isn't tonal contrast between the p tactile paving and surrounding paving because you put red tactile paving on red paving then put this barrier thing around it. But it also doesn't say obviously because I told you about manual for streets pulling the crossing points close to the corners. That means that then the tails often join up and the guy just doesn't really tell you what to do in that situation. Um, so you end up with this. Another problem here is cuz it's block paving, there's a lot less tactile contrast with a long cane between the tactile paving and the paving around it. So I think that's a crime. Um, and then this is the consequence of the of the having the perpendicular back edge thing where you've got a curve or or a not perpendicular with the the uh curve thing. And so then you end up with this massive area of tactile paving and you start to lose which direction you're supposed to be crossing anyway because like this one here, is it that way? Is it that way? You can't really tell from the tactile paving. That's really important because one way is like walking out into a main road and one way is crossing a little side road. Um, and then yeah, we got the block paving again here. Okay, so yeah, now we're into lawful E. Yeah. No, still fine. Chaotic. Good. So the tactile paving, it's the wrong color. It's black. Disaster. You haven't followed the guidance. But it's got way more tonal contrast when you take the color out than the the red does. Um, this is where you do the back edge to follow the front edge. Um, you've got much less tactile paving. You've got a much better indicator of where the curve is, but obviously you haven't got that information from the back edge. Um, then using cordroy to delineate the area where the road is, but it's not a crossing point. So, that's what they did. City of London did on Bank Junction that I thought was a lot better than not doing anything. Um, and it's probably better than using blister there, but that's a very controversial opinion. Um, and then this is like Singapore and Melbourne where they've done guidance paving. We don't do guidance paving anywhere, hardly anywhere in this country. And it's it could be really useful for people in lots of places. Um, like getting to the bus stop from the curb edge. amazing use case for for guidance paving almost never happens here. Um, and actually isn't really in the guidance. So, that's probably why. Um, so what does tactile paving justice mean? I'm not going to tell you what I think we should change about the guidance cuz that would be a disaster. But I'm just trying to say maybe we can agree on what would be just. So, I put I drew Don Norman. I thought like Don Norman's interactivity advice might be helpful like visibility, feedback, constraints, mapping, consistency. Um, I think that maps across to this. But more importantly, we're operating within all these trade-offs, right? If we're going to make it consistent, which we want, but that trades off against working well in the specific context that we're using it in. Um, there's obviously a trade-off between it being readily detectable by blind and partially sight people and not being a barrier to other disabled people. And then there's also a trade-off between we could make radical changes like doing the tails in guidance paving which would probably if we started from scratch that would probably be the right thing to do because it would reduce that that people confusing the tail for the the bit marking the edge somewhere else. But in between while we switched over that would be a nightmare because some of them would be blister and some of them would be um would be guidance. So the last thing on the justice is I think it would be helpful to have a hierarchy of what we're trying to do and and make sure that we like number one making people aware that they're entering the carriageway. That should always be more important than anything else. And I think if we situate around that then we're probably more likely to get to something that that that works well. Um, thank you very much. Uh, [applause]